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“– Yes, she asked us what we did after dark. We, girls, would pinch each oth-
er and tell her that we were out with the boys. We were only joking but she
took it seriously. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars [laughs] and love
making fun of people but Margaret thought it was all true.”
“– So you answered Margaret Mead with lies?
“– Yes, we just lied and lied.”
Spoken in Samoan, the above dialogue unfolded between the 86 year old
A’apua’ Aka’amu, an adolescent back then in the 1920s, and her interviewer.
The film centres on the polemic over Margaret Mead’s ethnographic descrip-
tion of teenage Samoan girls in 1928 and Derek Freeman’s refutation (Freeman
1983) in which he assigns himself the role of faithful translator of the Samoan
universe. Caught between truths and lies, female sexuality in Samoa emerg-
es in wildly contrasting forms in the two authors’ accounts. Were the Samoan
girls sexually at ease, (Geertz 2001:49) in stark contrast to American adoles-
cents of the period, or living under constant and careful surveillance?
Reading between the lines of the formal script, the situation that emerg-
es provides rich material for anthropological reflection. Mead is usually con-
fined to the margins of feminism’s ‘linear’ narrative (Costa 2001: 152), cited ei-
ther as a historical reference or as an author whose ideas have been refuted by
counterexamples from the very peoples she studied.
157
The Arapesh are usually cited as evidence of a fact that Mead would nev-
er willingly admit: namely, that the differential and, we could add, essential
polarity of the sexes and male dominance were universal cultural principles
(Rosaldo 1974: 18-19) and even structurally necessary (Héritier 1981: 49,52)
from whichever perspective we might choose to analyze kinship systems
(Viveiros de Castro 1990: 27).1
The film’s narrative is assembled through a series of interviewees – bi-
ographers, anthropologists, journalists, relatives and friends – interspersed
with images of Mead and Freeman in paradigmatic scenes among the disput-
ed natives, or speaking at tributes, lectures and interviews. In a fairly unsub-
tle fashion, the editing steadily erodes Mead’s popular and academic prestige.
Was the latter simply the result of an ethnographic lie?
In the end, the Samoans ‘steal the show.’ The accounts are conducted and
edited to confirm Freeman’s own ethnographic version: everyone – chiefs, a
renowned Samoan intellectual and Aka’amu herself – disagree with Mead’s
writings, albeit each in his or her own way.
During an anthropology class, a chief picks out Mead’s mistake in de-
scribing Samoan sexual life. He emphasizes his authority as a member of
the culture concerned and someone who grew up in Samoa. The specialist
in Samoan studies is equally forthright: for her, far from capturing Samoan
thought, Mead’s analysis merely expresses what the anthropologist herself
thought about sex, projecting her own desires and depicting the natives as
though they were ‘inhuman’ and ‘animals.’
Aka’amu’s own account, on the other hand, belies the idea that Mead had
misinterpreted the conduct of Samoans. Incited by the interviewer – and pre-
suming the accuracy of the translation provided in the film – Aka’amu says
that she only replied to the researcher with ‘lies’ and more ‘lies.’ Prior to this
point her recollections suggest some affection for the anthropologist.
Another chief, one of Mead’s former assistants, claims that the Samoans’
only wanted to provoke laughter and enliven their stories. Nothing they re-
counted went beyond ‘wrong stories’ told to captivate the young researcher.
Produced during a recent period of academic history when the post-
colonial critique of power, domination and fragmentation of the world
1 Héritier analyzes Arapesh social organization as a system founded on a formal analogy between
children and women who, as less responsible groups, need to be guided by men (Héritier 1981: 52).
2 Here I recall Clifford’s paradoxical analysis, which denounces ethnography’s ‘partial truths’ yet
takes as a ‘fact’ that “feminism had not contributed much to the theoretical analysis of ethnographies
as texts” (Clifford 1996:20). For a discussion of this point, which extends well beyond the scope of this
article, I refer the reader to the book by Behar & Gordon (1995).
3 For an exploration of some of the implications of Yanagisako & Collier’s work, such as their cri-
tique of the myth of egalitarian primitive society and their relapse into a new universalism, see Howell
& Melhuus (1993:51).
4 Here I refer to Pontes (2004:202-203).
5 This article is primarily based on my doctoral research, conducted since 2001 among the Rikbaktsa
(cf. Athila, 2006) with funding from FAPERJ and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research. While mostly a background topic in my Ph.D. thesis, the theme of gender was pursued more
vigorously in my post-doctoral research based at the Federal University of Santa Catarina since 2008,
part of a larger project on the Rikbaktsa concepts of beauty and transformation, one of whose inves-
tigative lines was precisely their role in the sociocosmological understanding of female homoerotic
relations. Currently this theme, along with other topics, is being researched as part of the Rikbaktsa
Culture Documentation Project, entitled “Tsapyina: producing beauty and transmitting knowledge in-
tergenerationally among the Rikbaktsa (Macro-Ge) of SW Amazonia,” coordinated by myself in con-
junction with the Indian Museum (RJ). The total amount of time spent in the field over this period is
sixteen months.
6 My worry over revealing of and writing about this discomfort came about on the eve of my present-
ing a paper on the not very conventional Rikbaktsa ideas about sex and reproduction at the 2008 meet-
ing of the Brazilian Anthropological Association in a forum called “Sexualities, Ethnic/Racial Cultures
and Identities”. The Rikbaktsa ideas ended up not appearing so special after all. My worry was that my
field is the anthropology of Brazilian Indians and not any form of political militancy, I might be ac-
cused of depoliticizing Rikbaktsa relations by “desexualizing” them. I got some comfort from Fonseca’s
report based on Costa’s work (2002 apud Fonseca 2004: 18). Fonseca proposes the non-existence of “man
and woman”, but of “concrete persons negotiating their relations on specific political and social bases”
(Fonseca 2004: 18).
7 Consequently I have opted to conceal the names and villages of these informants, indicating
merely their sex and the role they played in the events concerned.
“Ever since they pulled off the sloth’s tail and began to see who had [which]
paint design [at first the designs were all identical], who danced [in what or-
der]. They experimented at the end of the festival. First hazobiktsa; second
makwaraktsa; next bitsitsiyktsa [Rikbaktsa macro social groupings]. They
experimented in that way until it looked beautiful, tsapyitsa! The yel-
low group [makwaraktsa] experimented going in front. It didn’t look good.
Afterwards they went to see who was going to try making the porridge – mybai-
knytsa [the clan of the makwaraktsa group] made it properly, at the end of the
festival. That’s how it is.
Matrinxã, piava, all good fish. They ask when they ‘dance on the arm.’8 They
tried dancing ‘kin’ with ‘kin,’ it didn’t look beautiful – batsisapy – so they de-
cided to dance with non-kin. Then it turned out well, tsapyitsa. It remains fine
8 At a set moment at the end of the rainy season festivals, one or more women, providing they are
from the opposite moiety, may dance with a man, holding onto an armband made from plant fibre.
This gives women the prerrogative to ask the men for things – fish, pans and other items – to be repaid
in some form or other after the festival period. The Rikbaktsa usually refer to this practice as “dancing
on the arm.”
9 Conception theories do not always coincide with forms of recruitment or filiation. Hence a group
may, for example, attribute generation of a child to the man but determine that the child belongs to the
social group of the mother.
While most ethnologists identify men as those responsible for exchange (Lévi-
Strauss 1982: 73, 102 and elsewhere), women can intercept this circuit, alter-
ing its ‘meaning’ and its ‘product’ various times by designating someone’s
Bibliography
Received: 08/03/2010
Approved: 29/03/2010